FTTH in Europe

FTTH in Europe
According to Point Topic, there were as many as 16,4m fiber to the home/curb connections worldwide, of which about 750k in Western Europe. The majority of FTTH connections in WE is made by two operators: FastWeb (Italy) and Bredbandsbolaget (Sweden). A lot of trial networks or small deployments, such as Pau (south of France), Paris XV (France), Helsinki (Finland), are under way, but the main plans today are a 40,000 connection FTTH project in Amsterdam, and 2,9m households passed by DT in Germany.

If it is increasingly obvious that telcos will have to invest in fiber-based access network to deploy high speed and high added value services, it is not for tomorrow. Costs, difficulties of deployment in urban areas, technical issues still pending, are preventing a short term takeoff.